The protocol was defined by the IETF Signaling Transport (SIGTRAN) working group in 2000,[2] and is maintained by the IETF Transport Area (TSVWG) working group. RFC 4960 defines the protocol. RFC 3286 provides an introduction.

In the absence of native SCTP support in operating systems it is possible to tunnel SCTP over UDP,[3] as well as mapping TCP API calls to SCTP ones.[4]